One thing they can do to improve their reputation is bolster their social media presence. They can publish material related to the above, like information about transparency or environmental efforts, and can use it as a customer service tool. Being accessible and accountable increases trust.

If you jumped on the Creative Cloud bandwagon, you’re about to cash in one of the major perks of taking said leap. Keeping its promise to roll out new features to the aforementioned members first, Adobe has announced updates to Muse and Photoshop alongside Creative Cloud training materials and team subscriptions. Let’s hit the highlights, shall we? Muse can not only help you publish websites without writing a line of code, but the software now offers assistance with smartphone and tablet-friendly versions of desktop sites, too. As far as new features for Photoshop CS6 are concerned, conditional actions (if this, then that), expanded Smart Object support, improved 3D effects and default type styles all settle in on the tool bench.

Looking to opt in to Adobe’s software service for your entire studio? No worries, the company has also outed Creative Cloud subscriptions for teams — complete with centralized admin tools and expert support — for $69 per month. That’s not all. Less than a month ago, the wraps were taken off of Creative Cloud Connection for sharing all of those essential project files. Now, said functionality is being trotted out in proper fashion. From what we gather, this will be a Dropbox-esque affair complete with drag-and-drop functionality that extends across Touch apps, too. Clients can also view design files here, like those from InDesign, even if they don’t have the requisi! te softw are installed on their machines. If that wasn’t enough, training materials are on the way in the form of exclusive content for card-carrying members. Get all that? Good. For the full rundown on all of the new features, consult the full PR that follows.

Starbucks, purveyor of coffee flavored water, builder of coffee scented corner stores and shelter for no coffee drinking Wi-Fi leeches, has a new shtick: a premium gift card. It’s made of steel! It’s ‘specially etched’! And it’s a super, limited edition that inanely costs 450 bucks.

The gift card itself costs $50 to make, the other $400 will be loaded as Starbucks credit and can only be bought on Gilt. I guess Starbucks people go to Starbucks enough that the $400 will manifest destiny itself in the caffeinated brown liquid but damn if this isn’t some elitist craziness. The card, which will surely make its owners feel good about themselves, comes with “with gold-level Starbucks card membership benefits, such as gifts and freebie refills on brewed coffee and tea.”

Jason Goldberger, executive vice president at Gilt.com, told the USA Today it’s all about exclusivity:

“When you’re waiting in line at Starbucks, the next person in line won’t have it.”

But that apparently wasn’t cheap enough, because Google just dropped prices another 5%, Shailesh Rao, director of new products and solutions in the Google Enterprise unit, told InformationWeek.

It also added a bunch of new configuration options to make it more in line with all the things Amazon offers.

Rao says that Compute Engine wants to bring more startups onto its cloud. Startups are what propelled Amazon’s cloud services to become the most popular. One reason why startups are wary is because Compute Engine is still in “limited preview.” That’s a fancy way of saying that its still in beta mode.

Google hasn’t committed to a timeline when it’s cloud will leave beta and become a full-fledged service, Rao says.

Happy election day! Surely you’re not already tired of social media updates about politics, or the self-congratulatory Twitter messages from your friends who got up earlier than you did to stand in line. Now you can also see a map of everyone who used Foursquare to get an I Voted badge.

It’s kind of interesting because it includes user info like gender, and where and when votes were concentrated. Check it out.

Google search results are like the old beat up recliner of the internet. Your butt’s always there, and if anything changes, you notice. Well, Google changed the way its search results look. It’s a relatively small change, but you’re going to notice.

The biggest difference is that the bar along the left hand side of your searches is gone. This is where you used to break your search down into News, or whatever else. That function is now at the top of your results, along with the also relocated Search Tools. Search Tools moving means you don’t have those two butt ugly calendars with custom dates in your line of sight, which is a plus. This change has been live a day or two, and should only be a negative if you’re running a ton of searches (it’s been killing me).

Google is also featuring information from Google’s Knowledge Graph for popular searches, like “barack obama”, “mitt romney”, and “presidential election”, for example. So! Google’s a little prettier, and it’s rearranged the furniture a bit. Seems like a nice, small change, right? [BuzzFeed]

Whether it’s because of regulation, a conservative outlook, or simply because they don’t see the benefit, some industries have been incredibly slow to embrace the digital age.

However, even in the industries where it’s not widely adopted, making significant investments in digital technology and integrating it into an organization has a significant positive impact on the bottom line. Capgemeni Consulting estimates that ‘digital beginners,’ those companies who have barely touched digital technology are 24 percent less profitable than average.

“‘Beginners’ have barely started, usually because they’re unaware of the opportunities, ‘Fashionistas’ adopt the newest or sexiest digital innovations, but without a cohesive strategy or eye to maximizing business value, ‘Digital Conservatives’ have a cohesive vision, but are slow to invest in new technology, and finally, the ‘Digirati,’ who both invest in digital and integrate it with their whole organization.”

Here’s where major industries fit on the spectrum of going digital, from high technology at the top, to the pharmaceutical industry way at the bottom:

When apartment rental site AirBnB started making waves across the U.S. last year, New York City officials were quick to draw a line in the sand –– making it illegal and punishable by as much as $5,000 to rent rooms for longer than 30 days.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, it looks like they’ve agreed to bury the hatchet, at least for now. Mayor Bloomberg announced today his office will support AirBnB’s efforts to put free roofs over the heads of some 40,000 New Yorkers displaced by the superstorm.

AirBnB had already offered discounted lodging for Sandy survivors, but it’s now created a landing page for entirely free Sandy listings.

Hurricane Sandy was downgraded to a superstorm when it made landfall in New York and New Jersey early last week, but the damage is far from repaired. Public transit is only now chugging back to full speed, with some downtown areas still without normal service.

But it’s the tens of thousands of residents who lost their homes or were forced to leave in the wake of the storm that have posed the largest problem. Temperatures are dropping each day and with Wednesday’s Nor’easter dumping a pile of unexpected snow and slush on the city, it’s no wonder the city has ramped up its efforts to find these people a safe and warm place to stay.

For an yone willing to offer up space in their homes to people in need, sign up here.

According to Bloomberg Apple is considering a move away from Intel chips for its cherished Mac line. The move would be the third major CPU shift for the brand which has previously relied on Motorola 68000 and Power PC chips. The move away from Intel could also mean a move away from x86 as Apple has been heavily invested in its own ARM-based chip designs in recent years. Bloomberg’s sources suggest that Cupertino is actively working on a version of its tweaked ARM architecture that would run inside Mac PC, in particular its laptop products could stand to benefit from its battery sipping design.

The change will not happen immediately. In fact, the sources said such a move was years away, potentially not happening till 2017. But, as the gulf between “mobile” and “desktop” products begins to shrink and the boundaries blend, it would only seem to make sense that Apple would look to leverage its high-profile purchase of P.A. Semi to good use and inch ever closer to being a completely self-reliant corporate entity. We don’t think it’s any secret that Apple would, if it could, design and manufacture every component itself.

As we’ve pointed out in the past, the industry of the future is healthcare.

The following chart is based on Friday’s jobs report, and it shows two things. The blue line is the total number of healthcare jobs. As you can see, it basically never stops going up (regardless sof business cycles) and has now passed 14.3 million.

The red line is the monthly change from month to month, and once again last month, America added over 30K new jobs, a pretty enormous sum, given that only 171K new jobs were created in total.

Regardless of what happens with government healthcare spending, the demand for more and more healthcare (as the US population ages) seems inexorable. More and more people will be working in this area.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.